In the first Metal Gear Solid, there was a pretty political anti-nuke storyline which accompanied the game play. Most of the dialogue took place via radio contact with various characters, and you could "call back" to continue the dialogue, or just switch off your radio and keep moving. But the central storyline (Solid vs Liquid, the evolution of foxhound, Gray Fox, FoxDie virus, genetic engineering, etc) was told in such a way that you could take or leave the anti-nuke dialogue without hurting the central story. Listening was optional, and you could ignore the anti-nuke dialogue without missing out on portions of the plot. In short, he included a morality play in Metal Gear Solid, but he put it in the back-story so that people who weren't interested didn't have to sit through it.
In my opinion, what Kojima is actually doing is writing characters into the story that promote a particular value system. As he's a game designer, whether he agrees with these politics or not is not really central to the discussion. His technique (politics in the backstory) adds depth to the game, and as long as he does it in a tasteful and optional way like he did in the first Metal Gear Solid, I see nothing wrong with it. A crucial question to the Metal Gear story is the question of good and evil, and whether a trained killer like Solid Snake is any better than the terrorists he fights against. Kojima and the rest of the Metal Gear/Konami team did an excellent job of leaving the answer to that question as an exercise for the gamer; but the back-story about the nuclear/terrorist threat and the corruption of black-ops units gives the player something to think about beyond where his next ammo clip or ration is coming from.
At any rate, if what you're saying is that you don't agree with Kojima's politics, I guess I can respect that. But if what you're asking of Kojima is "less backstory, more game mechanics", then you're probably playing the wrong kind of game. There are plenty of games which center around killing without discussing the ethics of war and violence. For example, just about every FPS and fighter on the market. The Metal Gear franchise has always had an extensive story surrounding the gameplay, and the story has always been a crucial part of what made the game memorable. The anti-war slant is new with Metal Gear Solid (the earlier games were more about betrayal), but the dynamic is the same--as Solid Snake progresses with his espionage, a story about right and wrong unfolds around him.
Besides, if you want tactical espionage without a plot line, you can always play the Metal Gear VR Missions, which are considerably more challenging than the original Metal Gear Solid, and don't really go into a political back-story.
I work as an administrator for an e-commerce company which provides a variety of commerce services including software downloads. Our quality of service is very dependent on quality of bandwith. We have discussed QoS as a way of ensuring that employee usages such as Napster can be allowed without negatively impacting our business-critical network applications. We segment this as much as possible inside our own system (production servers on separate networks from users' workstations, etc), but eventually all the traffic is moving through the same set of pipes out onto the Internet. That's one place where QoS is an advantage--when you want to protect your primary bandwidth usage, without actually restricting other activities outright.
Another good application of this is backups over a network. You don't want backups (which are a pig for bandwidth, but not time-sensitive) having a negative impact on your production network apps, but at the same time segmenting backups onto a separate network means a lot of wasted resources. QoS is a decent solution for this, particularly on small LANs and systems where you can't afford to have a separate network for your backups.
I think most users' primary objection to this is that good applications of the technology will get lost alongside evil applications of it--your Internet access is restricted to 300 bytes/second because the CEO or the resident BOFH has QoS'ed everybody else down to nothing to protect their own Internet FPS games. But really the problem here is bad sysadmins and bosses, not bad technology.
The DoS-via-QoS question is an interesting one, though. It's a kink that will have to be worked out before QoS can really be viable, at least in environments where your Internet service is mission-critical.
Man-In-The-Middle attacks are only a threat if the initial key exchange can be intercepted, and if the key is unsigned. Exchanging the MD5 digests of your keys by another medium can guarantee the integrity of the keys.
Among other things, O'Reilly's excellent book on PGP has a few novel suggestions on MD5 digest exchange and other methods of ensuring your key's integrity.
Here are some good ways to make your public key trustworthy to others:
Have your key signed by a number of other people, so that people using your key can check its integrity against other keys they use and trust.
Send out your key's MD5 digest often, and over a wide variety of channels. You should distribute your key's MD5 digest atmost as widely as you distribute the key itself--remember, anybody can get your public key, but the best way they have to know that the key hasn't been subverted is to compare the key with its MD5 digest, or some other checksum of the key.
Encourage people who use your public key to check it against your MD5 digest on a regular basis. If your key ring is subverted, all your keys can be replaced by Man-In-the-Middle variants. Manually checking the MD5 digests of the keys you use every once in a while is a good guard against this. In fact, there are a few nice tools out there which will do this for you.
It's good to keep in mind that a Man-In-the-Middle attack is just trickery--convincing somebody to encrypt their message with your public key instead of the intended recipient's key, and then re-encrypting the message and sending it to the recipient on the sender's behalf. Public-key systems are the most vulnerable to this during initial key exchange; afterward, it's not just enough to compromise a node in the store-and-forward chain, you also have to subvert both sides' key-rings. That is, if you want to hear both sides of the conversation.
It's better to look at that pirating quote in a slightly larger context.
"At the time Pavlovich posted DeCSS on the Internet, he knew that DeCSS facilitates the pirating of DVDs (Pavlovich Aug. Depo., pp. 59- 2 60);"
"At the time Pavlovich posted DeCSS on the Internet, he knew that pirating DVDs is wrongful conduct (Pavlovich Aug. Depo., p. 71)."
Someone should sue auto makers because 'at the time the auto makers sold their cars, they knew that cars facilitated drive-by shootings', and 'at the time the auto makers sold their cars, they knew that drive-by shootings are wrongful conduct'.
DeCSS only really has two applications. The first is to implement a DVD-on-Linux tool, something that did not exist at the time. The second is to pirate DVDs. Likewise, there are two arguments against DeCSS; the first is that it cheats DVD CCA out of their fair licensing fees for the technology. Does anybody have information on what they're charging to let somebody develop a legitimate, licensed equivalent of DeCSS for Linux? The other argument against DeCSS is that it should not be allowed because it would facilitate piracy.
Failing to prevent a tool's use in illegal situations does not mean the maker of a tool has broken the law. Moreso, the possibility of breaking the law with a tool is not sufficient reason to outlaw that tool's distribution, at least where legitimate uses of the tool exist.
Of course, this is the same industry that's been on the receiving end of other hysterical suits attempting to establish that music, television, and movies have lead to suicide or other unpleasant behavior. Look deeper. What does Hollywood the aggressor have in common with Hollywood the victim?
In both situations, a case was made by lawyers who pursue it simply because the case can be won, regardless whether the law is a good law or not. This is a nation where justice and victory in court are two different things. One is a pleasant but necessary fiction, the other is bought and sold. And I don't think we should rail against Hollywood for playing that game. If anything, we should rail against our lawmakers and our government for allowing the game to be played. Lawsuits like this will continue until the legal system is able to take the justice of a law into account as well as the correct application of that law in a case.
Hasbro has Shockwave versions of several of the disputed games at atari.com as a sales hook for the online store (play Missile Command for free, eventually lose, hey look, click here for the online store, repeat).
The Atari game market (I'm talking strictly about the titles marketed at the atari.com web site) now seems to be nostalgia games, so it seems logical that Hasbro would want to shut down other nostalgia titles which "rip off" their trademarked/copyrighted titles.
They also market a brand of play-by-email games. Hasbro claims to have rights to some of the originals (X-Com and Scrabble are the two I confirmed, possibly also Clue), which means they might pursue lawsuits against knockoff-makers of those titles. X-Com you'd expect, that's a newer title than the Atari titles, but what surprised me was that they also aggressively protect Scrabble.
The board game has been around for ages, and after some brief poking around, it appears Hasbro is indeed requesting that people who author free knockoffs, well, knock it off. I've seen three or four web sites in the last hour or so with Java scrabble (and such) that have been shut down, usually with a note to the effect that Hasbro made them do it. This link to a FAQ for a scrabble-playing MUD seems to describe the line between knock-off and acceptable use reasonably well.
So after a little digging around, it seems to me that this instance (Hasbro bringing a case against other game manufacturers) is a little bit noiser than other similar legal actions by Hasbro, but that Hasbro is following a standard operating procedure of protecting its intellectual property.
Whether that's a bad thing or not... I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called sales tax. States should do a better job of enforcing their existing taxes before trying to collect new ones.
In my opinion, what Kojima is actually doing is writing characters into the story that promote a particular value system. As he's a game designer, whether he agrees with these politics or not is not really central to the discussion. His technique (politics in the backstory) adds depth to the game, and as long as he does it in a tasteful and optional way like he did in the first Metal Gear Solid, I see nothing wrong with it. A crucial question to the Metal Gear story is the question of good and evil, and whether a trained killer like Solid Snake is any better than the terrorists he fights against. Kojima and the rest of the Metal Gear/Konami team did an excellent job of leaving the answer to that question as an exercise for the gamer; but the back-story about the nuclear/terrorist threat and the corruption of black-ops units gives the player something to think about beyond where his next ammo clip or ration is coming from.
At any rate, if what you're saying is that you don't agree with Kojima's politics, I guess I can respect that. But if what you're asking of Kojima is "less backstory, more game mechanics", then you're probably playing the wrong kind of game. There are plenty of games which center around killing without discussing the ethics of war and violence. For example, just about every FPS and fighter on the market. The Metal Gear franchise has always had an extensive story surrounding the gameplay, and the story has always been a crucial part of what made the game memorable. The anti-war slant is new with Metal Gear Solid (the earlier games were more about betrayal), but the dynamic is the same--as Solid Snake progresses with his espionage, a story about right and wrong unfolds around him.
Besides, if you want tactical espionage without a plot line, you can always play the Metal Gear VR Missions, which are considerably more challenging than the original Metal Gear Solid, and don't really go into a political back-story.
Another good application of this is backups over a network. You don't want backups (which are a pig for bandwidth, but not time-sensitive) having a negative impact on your production network apps, but at the same time segmenting backups onto a separate network means a lot of wasted resources. QoS is a decent solution for this, particularly on small LANs and systems where you can't afford to have a separate network for your backups.
I think most users' primary objection to this is that good applications of the technology will get lost alongside evil applications of it--your Internet access is restricted to 300 bytes/second because the CEO or the resident BOFH has QoS'ed everybody else down to nothing to protect their own Internet FPS games. But really the problem here is bad sysadmins and bosses, not bad technology.
The DoS-via-QoS question is an interesting one, though. It's a kink that will have to be worked out before QoS can really be viable, at least in environments where your Internet service is mission-critical.
Among other things, O'Reilly's excellent book on PGP has a few novel suggestions on MD5 digest exchange and other methods of ensuring your key's integrity.
Here are some good ways to make your public key trustworthy to others:
- Have your key signed by a number of other people, so that people using your key can check its integrity against other keys they use and trust.
- Send out your key's MD5 digest often, and over a wide variety of channels. You should distribute your key's MD5 digest atmost as widely as you distribute the key itself--remember, anybody can get your public key, but the best way they have to know that the key hasn't been subverted is to compare the key with its MD5 digest, or some other checksum of the key.
- Encourage people who use your public key to check it against your MD5 digest on a regular basis. If your key ring is subverted, all your keys can be replaced by Man-In-the-Middle variants. Manually checking the MD5 digests of the keys you use every once in a while is a good guard against this. In fact, there are a few nice tools out there which will do this for you.
It's good to keep in mind that a Man-In-the-Middle attack is just trickery--convincing somebody to encrypt their message with your public key instead of the intended recipient's key, and then re-encrypting the message and sending it to the recipient on the sender's behalf. Public-key systems are the most vulnerable to this during initial key exchange; afterward, it's not just enough to compromise a node in the store-and-forward chain, you also have to subvert both sides' key-rings. That is, if you want to hear both sides of the conversation."At the time Pavlovich posted DeCSS on the Internet, he knew that DeCSS facilitates the pirating of DVDs (Pavlovich Aug. Depo., pp. 59- 2 60);"
"At the time Pavlovich posted DeCSS on the Internet, he knew that pirating DVDs is wrongful conduct (Pavlovich Aug. Depo., p. 71)."
Someone should sue auto makers because 'at the time the auto makers sold their cars, they knew that cars facilitated drive-by shootings', and 'at the time the auto makers sold their cars, they knew that drive-by shootings are wrongful conduct'.
DeCSS only really has two applications. The first is to implement a DVD-on-Linux tool, something that did not exist at the time. The second is to pirate DVDs. Likewise, there are two arguments against DeCSS; the first is that it cheats DVD CCA out of their fair licensing fees for the technology. Does anybody have information on what they're charging to let somebody develop a legitimate, licensed equivalent of DeCSS for Linux? The other argument against DeCSS is that it should not be allowed because it would facilitate piracy.
Failing to prevent a tool's use in illegal situations does not mean the maker of a tool has broken the law. Moreso, the possibility of breaking the law with a tool is not sufficient reason to outlaw that tool's distribution, at least where legitimate uses of the tool exist.
Of course, this is the same industry that's been on the receiving end of other hysterical suits attempting to establish that music, television, and movies have lead to suicide or other unpleasant behavior. Look deeper. What does Hollywood the aggressor have in common with Hollywood the victim?
In both situations, a case was made by lawyers who pursue it simply because the case can be won, regardless whether the law is a good law or not. This is a nation where justice and victory in court are two different things. One is a pleasant but necessary fiction, the other is bought and sold. And I don't think we should rail against Hollywood for playing that game. If anything, we should rail against our lawmakers and our government for allowing the game to be played. Lawsuits like this will continue until the legal system is able to take the justice of a law into account as well as the correct application of that law in a case.
The Atari game market (I'm talking strictly about the titles marketed at the atari.com web site) now seems to be nostalgia games, so it seems logical that Hasbro would want to shut down other nostalgia titles which "rip off" their trademarked/copyrighted titles.
They also market a brand of play-by-email games. Hasbro claims to have rights to some of the originals (X-Com and Scrabble are the two I confirmed, possibly also Clue), which means they might pursue lawsuits against knockoff-makers of those titles. X-Com you'd expect, that's a newer title than the Atari titles, but what surprised me was that they also aggressively protect Scrabble.
The board game has been around for ages, and after some brief poking around, it appears Hasbro is indeed requesting that people who author free knockoffs, well, knock it off. I've seen three or four web sites in the last hour or so with Java scrabble (and such) that have been shut down, usually with a note to the effect that Hasbro made them do it. This link to a FAQ for a scrabble-playing MUD seems to describe the line between knock-off and acceptable use reasonably well.
So after a little digging around, it seems to me that this instance (Hasbro bringing a case against other game manufacturers) is a little bit noiser than other similar legal actions by Hasbro, but that Hasbro is following a standard operating procedure of protecting its intellectual property.
Whether that's a bad thing or not... I don't know.